Antidote to Stress: Imagination and Creativity

From Mind Body Space, it's RxChillPill, a show about science-backed resilience skills and powerful stress management tools to make you the boss of your own brain. I'm your host, Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a physician specializing in mind-body medicine and a mom of two amazing kids. There are three different kinds of episodes: one where I interview fascinating people and experts who share resilience tips for the mind, body, and space. Another where you'll find short meditations you can do anywhere, anytime, to get your daily dose of the relaxation response, the complete opposite of the stress response. In the third type, you'll get science-backed resilience boosters and antidotes to stress that really work, so you can tap into your own brain superpowers and apply liberally in your daily life. Do you remember the last time you used your imagination? I don't mean for worry or to list out your to-do list, but I'm talking about the kind like when I wore Wonder Woman Underoos. Yes, that's called Underoos, U-N-D-E-R-O-O-S. That was in the late '70s. They were made by the Fruit of the Loom company, and I'm so happy to tell you that they still exist because I just looked it up on Google and they're available today. So I'm going to be ordering a pair for myself as soon as I'm done with this podcast. Anyway, being a kid and using our imagination was fun. Maybe we used to talk to our dolls and they'd talk back to us. Maybe even our pencils talked to us. I remember my daughter and her best friend making up stories about her pencils and they'd spend endless hours with these imaginary pencil families. And no one said not to imagine things when we were little. Fantasy books are so popular and I know kids are fully into their imagination. But sometime in middle school, or maybe even earlier, anyways, somewhere along the line, we're told that it's just simply not cool, maybe even weird. We learn by osmosis that it's just simply not what we should be doing, and all of a sudden we have times and places where it's good to use our imaginations and when it's not. It's only good on Halloween, or if you're in the school play, or in an art class, and then eventually our imaginations are out of our everyday reach, even though we now know that imagination and creativity are powerful antidotes to everyday stress. Now let's look at an everyday example where imagination can turn drudgery around. It may seem silly at first, but just remember, your mind and body will thank you for this incredible and powerful antidote to stress that you have with you at all times. So just humor me and imagine this common scenario. As we're adulting and trudging along, we find ourselves maybe late for work one day or school. The train's late and we're in full-out stress mode. Never mind that we can't change the train being late. Never mind that the toxic stress of anger and frustration in a situation where we can't control it that that's taking a toll on our physiology and aging us at the cellular level. Just let that sink in. Stress ages us. Yes, toxic everyday stress ages us at the cellular level. But we can no longer reach for the luxury of our imaginations. We can't visualize a story where the train conductor was busy being a superhero that morning, fighting evil weather lords from icing up the tracks, even if it's a hot summer day. We can no longer make up fantastic flourishing stories to help us get through life. Our once easily accessible phantasmagorical stories— I just looked that up, by the way, and it's a real word, at least in the Urban Dictionary. It means fantastic, amazing, and magical. Phantasmagorical. So knowing that there are phantasmagorical reasons for our train being so late allows us to maybe grin a little, maybe go ahead and calmly text people who need to know where we are, or maybe rearrange our schedules accordingly, all with that little grin on our face, knowing that everything is as it should be. To have an even deeper understanding of why we should care about using our imagination and nurturing it, just look around. Imagination is how we built everything around us. There's almost nothing that didn't come from someone's phantasmagorical imagination. The greatest scientists use their imaginations all the time. I remember a conversation I had with my mentor from medical school, Dr. Rodolfo Linas, author of over 800 scientific articles and often referred to as the father of modern neuroscience, about how curiosity and imagination are his driving forces to figure out problems and solve things, from the time he was a little kid trying to figure out how a mechanical doorstop shaped like a cat worked in his grandfather's home, to discovering the calcium channel in neurons. Now more than ever, it's important to nurture and encourage imagination in ourselves and in the kids that are our future. We even know that the future of being strong in the workforce depends on being sharp in this area. Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Consultants predict that the future of staying competitive with artificial intelligence and automation requires creativity and imagination. AI, or artificial intelligence, and technology will replace a lot of jobs, and even knowledge workers like accountants, medical providers, and legal professionals will have competition from robots. But I'm going to tell you right now, our imagination and creativity is what sets us apart. Computers are great at following orders and tasks, but it's still not great at looking for something very subtle or making that final decision. It takes imagination to connect all of those dots. So the future is clear. We need to rethink what we as humans have that machines don't. In order to succeed when machines replace us, we need to use our power of imagination with machines to augment our power rather than to replace us. And don't worry if you feel rusty on your imagination and visualization skills. As humans, we're all born with this capacity, this amazing phantasmagorical capacity to imagine. And like anything else, it's a skill. And as all skills go, with practice we can get better. We just need a little practice if it's gotten away from us on our path to adulting. So start by just giving yourself permission to imagine things, to make phantasmagorical stories throughout the day for yourself, just for entertainment and to destress. Go to our show notes to find a link to my meditation recordings. Keep an eye out for the ones that focus on mental practice and visualizations. And don't forget, kids need to be reminded to use their imaginations too, so ask them something funny today like, Hey, what do you think of pink elephants? And see what they have to say. If you found this podcast helpful to you, please subscribe, post ratings and reviews, and share it with everyone you know who wants to stress less and do more. This knowledge is really powerful and science-based. We need to share it with as many people as possible to help with this epidemic of stress and the stress-related diseases that we're seeing today. I know your time is gold, so thank you, and I want to hear from you. Go to mindbodyspace.com, subscribe, and ask me any questions and suggest any topics that you'd like to hear in the future. You'll also find episode show notes and resources on the podcast page. While you're there, check out our online school for courses you can take, like Stress Less and Do More series for students and parents, Get Smarter Than Our Smartphones course, and the full-on SMART course. SMART stands for Stress Management and Resilience Training. It's a research-backed course designed by the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and I'm your certified provider. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD wishing you wellness.